OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Temporal Predictive Coding for Gradient Compression in Distributed Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

This paper proposes a prediction-based gradient compression method for distributed learning with event-triggered communication. Our goal is to reduce the amount of information transmitted from the distributed agents to the parameter server by exploiting temporal correlation in the local gradients. We use a linear predictor that \textit{combines past gradients to form a prediction of the current gradient}, with coefficients that are optimized by solving a least-square problem. In each iteration, every agent transmits the predictor coefficients to the server such that the predicted local gradient can be computed. The difference between the true local gradient and the predicted one, termed the \textit{prediction residual, is only transmitted when its norm is above some threshold.} When this additional communication step is omitted, the server uses the prediction as the estimated gradient. This proposed design shows notable performance gains compared to existing methods in the literature, achieving convergence with reduced communication costs.
Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Grasping with Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Dexterous hands exhibit significant potential for complex real-world grasping tasks. While recent studies have primarily focused on learning policies for specific robotic hands, the development of a universal policy that controls diverse dexterous hands remains largely unexplored. In this work, we study the learning of cross-embodiment dexterous grasping policies using reinforcement learning (RL). Inspired by the capability of human hands to control various dexterous hands through teleoperation, we propose a universal action space based on the human hand's eigengrasps. The policy outputs eigengrasp actions that are then converted into specific joint actions for each robot hand through a retargeting mapping. We simplify the robot hand's proprioception to include only the positions of fingertips and the palm, offering a unified observation space across different robot hands. Our approach demonstrates an 80% success rate in grasping objects from the YCB dataset across four distinct embodiments using a single vision-based policy. Additionally, our policy exhibits zero-shot generalization to two previously unseen embodiments and significant improvement in efficient finetuning. For further details and videos, visit our project page https://sites.google.com/view/crossdex.
Dynamic Gradient Alignment for Online Data Mixing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

The composition of training data mixtures is critical for effectively training large language models (LLMs), as it directly impacts their performance on downstream tasks. Our goal is to identify an optimal data mixture to specialize an LLM for a specific task with access to only a few examples. Traditional approaches to this problem include ad-hoc reweighting methods, importance sampling, and gradient alignment techniques. This paper focuses on gradient alignment and introduces Dynamic Gradient Alignment (DGA), a scalable online gradient alignment algorithm. DGA dynamically estimates the pre-training data mixture on which the models' gradients align as well as possible with those of the model on the specific task. DGA is the first gradient alignment approach that incurs minimal overhead compared to standard pre-training and outputs a competitive model, eliminating the need for retraining the model. Experimentally, we demonstrate significant improvements over importance sampling in two key scenarios: (i) when the pre-training set is small and importance sampling overfits due to limited data; and (ii) when there is insufficient specialized data, trapping importance sampling on narrow pockets of data. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of gradient alignment methods in optimizing training data mixtures, particularly in data-constrained environments, and offer a practical solution for enhancing LLM performance on specific tasks with limited data availability.
SwarmCVT: Centroidal Voronoi Tessellation-Based Path Planning for Very-Large-Scale Robotics
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2024
Year: 2024

Swarm robotics, or very large-scale robotics (VLSR), has many meaningful applications for complicated tasks. However, the complexity of motion control and energy costs stack up quickly as the number of robots increases. In addressing this problem, our previous studies have formulated various methods employing macroscopic and microscopic approaches. These methods enable microscopic robots to adhere to a reference Gaussian mixture model (GMM) distribution observed at the macroscopic scale. As a result, optimizing the macroscopic level will result in an optimal overall result. However, all these methods require systematic and global generation of Gaussian components (GCs) within obstacle-free areas to construct the GMM trajectories. This work utilizes centroidal Voronoi tessellation to generate GCs methodically. Consequently, it demonstrates performance improvement while also ensuring consistency and reliability.
Choices are More Important than Efforts: LLM Enables Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

With expansive state-action spaces, efficient multi-agent exploration remains a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning. Although pursuing novelty, diversity, or uncertainty attracts increasing attention, redundant efforts brought by exploration without proper guidance choices poses a practical issue for the community. This paper introduces a systematic approach, termed LEMAE, choosing to channel informative task-relevant guidance from a knowledgeable Large Language Model (LLM) for Efficient Multi-Agent Exploration. Specifically, we ground linguistic knowledge from LLM into symbolic key states, that are critical for task fulfillment, in a discriminative manner at low LLM inference costs. To unleash the power of key states, we design Subspace-based Hindsight Intrinsic Reward (SHIR) to guide agents toward key states by increasing reward density. Additionally, we build the Key State Memory Tree (KSMT) to track transitions between key states in a specific task for organized exploration. Benefiting from diminishing redundant explorations, LEMAE outperforms existing SOTA approaches on the challenging benchmarks (e.g., SMAC and MPE) by a large margin, achieving a 10x acceleration in certain scenarios.
Convolutional Variational Autoencoders for Spectrogram Compression in Automatic Speech Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2024
Year: 2024

For many Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks audio features as spectrograms show better results than Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), but in practice they are hard to use due to a complex dimensionality of a feature space. The following paper presents an alternative approach towards generating compressed spectrogram representation, based on Convolutional Variational Autoencoders (VAE). A Convolutional VAE model was trained on a subsample of the LibriSpeech dataset to reconstruct short fragments of audio spectrograms (25 ms) from a 13-dimensional embedding. The trained model for a 40-dimensional (300 ms) embedding was used to generate features for corpus of spoken commands on the GoogleSpeechCommands dataset. Using the generated features an ASR system was built and compared to the model with MFCC features.
Deep Learning-Based Prediction of Suspension Dynamics Performance in Multi-Axle Vehicles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents a deep learning-based framework for predicting the dynamic performance of suspension systems in multi-axle vehicles, emphasizing the integration of machine learning with traditional vehicle dynamics modeling. A Multi-Task Deep Belief Network Deep Neural Network (MTL-DBN-DNN) was developed to capture the relationships between key vehicle parameters and suspension performance metrics. The model was trained on data generated from numerical simulations and demonstrated superior prediction accuracy compared to conventional DNN models. A comprehensive sensitivity analysis was conducted to assess the impact of various vehicle and suspension parameters on dynamic suspension performance. Additionally, the Suspension Dynamic Performance Index (SDPI) was introduced as a holistic measure to quantify overall suspension performance, accounting for the combined effects of multiple parameters. The findings highlight the effectiveness of multitask learning in improving predictive models for complex vehicle systems.
IC3M: In-Car Multimodal Multi-object Monitoring for Abnormal Status of Both Driver and Passengers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, in-car monitoring has emerged as a promising technology for detecting early-stage abnormal status of the driver and providing timely alerts to prevent traffic accidents. Although training models with multimodal data enhances the reliability of abnormal status detection, the scarcity of labeled data and the imbalance of class distribution impede the extraction of critical abnormal state features, significantly deteriorating training performance. Furthermore, missing modalities due to environment and hardware limitations further exacerbate the challenge of abnormal status identification. More importantly, monitoring abnormal health conditions of passengers, particularly in elderly care, is of paramount importance but remains underexplored. To address these challenges, we introduce our IC3M, an efficient camera-rotation-based multimodal framework for monitoring both driver and passengers in a car. Our IC3M comprises two key modules: an adaptive threshold pseudo-labeling strategy and a missing modality reconstruction. The former customizes pseudo-labeling thresholds for different classes based on the class distribution, generating class-balanced pseudo labels to guide model training effectively, while the latter leverages crossmodality relationships learned from limited labels to accurately recover missing modalities by distribution transferring from available modalities. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that IC3M outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in accuracy, precision, and recall while exhibiting superior robustness under limited labeled data and severe missing modality.
Beyond Squared Error: Exploring Loss Design for Enhanced Training of Generative Flow Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are a novel class of generative models designed to sample from unnormalized distributions and have found applications in various important tasks, attracting great research interest in their training algorithms. In general, GFlowNets are trained by fitting the forward flow to the backward flow on sampled training objects. Prior work focused on the choice of training objects, parameterizations, sampling and resampling strategies, and backward policies, aiming to enhance credit assignment, exploration, or exploitation of the training process. However, the choice of regression loss, which can highly influence the exploration and exploitation behavior of the under-training policy, has been overlooked. Due to the lack of theoretical understanding for choosing an appropriate regression loss, most existing algorithms train the flow network by minimizing the squared error of the forward and backward flows in log-space, i.e., using the quadratic regression loss. In this work, we rigorously prove that distinct regression losses correspond to specific divergence measures, enabling us to design and analyze regression losses according to the desired properties of the corresponding divergence measures. Specifically, we examine two key properties: zero-forcing and zero-avoiding, where the former promotes exploitation and higher rewards, and the latter encourages exploration and enhances diversity. Based on our theoretical framework, we propose three novel regression losses, namely, Shifted-Cosh, Linex(1/2), and Linex(1). We evaluate them across three benchmarks: hyper-grid, bit-sequence generation, and molecule generation. Our proposed losses are compatible with most existing training algorithms, and significantly improve the performances of the algorithms concerning convergence speed, sample diversity, and robustness.
Labor Migration Modeling through Large-scale Job Query Data
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Accurate and timely modeling of labor migration is crucial for various urban governance and commercial tasks, such as local policy-making and business site selection. However, existing studies on labor migration largely rely on limited survey data with statistical methods, which fail to deliver timely and fine-grained insights for time-varying regional trends. To this end, we propose a deep learning-based spatial-temporal labor migration analysis framework, DHG-SIL, by leveraging large-scale job query data. Specifically, we first acquire labor migration intention as a proxy of labor migration via job queries from one of the world's largest search engines. Then, a Disprepant Homophily co-preserved Graph Convolutional Network (DH-GCN) and an interpretable temporal module are respectively proposed to capture cross-city and sequential labor migration dependencies. Besides, we introduce four interpretable variables to quantify city migration properties, which are co-optimized with city representations via tailor-designed contrastive losses. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our DHG-SIL. Notably, DHG-SIL has been deployed as a core component of a cooperative partner's intelligent human resource system, and the system supported a series of city talent attraction reports.
Hate Personified: Investigating the role of LLMs in content moderation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

For subjective tasks such as hate detection, where people perceive hate differently, the Large Language Model's (LLM) ability to represent diverse groups is unclear. By including additional context in prompts, we comprehensively analyze LLM's sensitivity to geographical priming, persona attributes, and numerical information to assess how well the needs of various groups are reflected. Our findings on two LLMs, five languages, and six datasets reveal that mimicking persona-based attributes leads to annotation variability. Meanwhile, incorporating geographical signals leads to better regional alignment. We also find that the LLMs are sensitive to numerical anchors, indicating the ability to leverage community-based flagging efforts and exposure to adversaries. Our work provides preliminary guidelines and highlights the nuances of applying LLMs in culturally sensitive cases.
Data Similarity-Based One-Shot Clustering for Multi-Task Hierarchical Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

We address the problem of cluster identity estimation in a hierarchical federated learning setting in which users work toward learning different tasks. To overcome the challenge of task heterogeneity, users need to be grouped in a way such that users with the same task are in the same group, conducting training together, while sharing the weights of feature extraction layers with the other groups. Toward that end, we propose a one-shot clustering algorithm that can effectively identify and group users based on their data similarity. This enables more efficient collaboration and sharing of a common layer representation within the federated learning system. Our proposed algorithm not only enhances the clustering process, but also overcomes challenges related to privacy concerns, communication overhead, and the need for prior knowledge about learning models or loss function behaviors. We validate our proposed algorithm using various datasets such as CIFAR-10 and Fashion MNIST, and show that it outperforms the baseline in terms of accuracy and variance reduction.
CorPipe at CRAC 2024: Predicting Zero Mentions from Raw Text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

We present CorPipe 24, the winning entry to the CRAC 2024 Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution. In this third iteration of the shared task, a novel objective is to also predict empty nodes needed for zero coreference mentions (while the empty nodes were given on input in previous years). This way, coreference resolution can be performed on raw text. We evaluate two model variants: a~two-stage approach (where the empty nodes are predicted first using a pretrained encoder model and then processed together with sentence words by another pretrained model) and a single-stage approach (where a single pretrained encoder model generates empty nodes, coreference mentions, and coreference links jointly). In both settings, CorPipe surpasses other participants by a large margin of 3.9 and 2.8 percent points, respectively. The source code and the trained model are available at https://github.com/ufal/crac2024-corpipe.
Vinoground: Scrutinizing LMMs over Dense Temporal Reasoning with Short Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2024
Year: 2024

There has been growing sentiment recently that modern large multimodal models (LMMs) have addressed most of the key challenges related to short video comprehension. As a result, both academia and industry are gradually shifting their attention towards the more complex challenges posed by understanding long-form videos. However, is this really the case? Our studies indicate that LMMs still lack many fundamental reasoning capabilities even when dealing with short videos. We introduce Vinoground, a temporal counterfactual LMM evaluation benchmark encompassing 1000 short and natural video-caption pairs. We demonstrate that existing LMMs severely struggle to distinguish temporal differences between different actions and object transformations. For example, the best model GPT-4o only obtains ~50% on our text and video scores, showing a large gap compared to the human baseline of ~90%. All open-source multimodal models and CLIP-based models perform much worse, producing mostly random chance performance. Through this work, we shed light onto the fact that temporal reasoning in short videos is a problem yet to be fully solved. The dataset and evaluation code are available at https://vinoground.github.io.
Physical Layer Mutual Authentication in RIS-Aided Monostatic Backscatter Communications: A Dual-Edged Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2024
Year: 2024

Backscatter communication (BC) emerges as a pivotal technology for ultra-low-power energy harvesting applications, but its practical deployment is often hampered by notable security vulnerabilities. Physical layer authentication (PLA) offers a promising solution for securing BC by leveraging the unique characteristics of the communication medium. However, existing PLA approaches often fall short due to limited signal strength in practical BC scenarios and performance deterioration with increasing distance between the tag and the reader. Moreover, achieving mutual authentication has been largely neglected in current PLA schemes, given the passive nature of tags and their limited computational and energy resources. This paper introduces a reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-aided PLA scheme based on the physical features of received signals at legitimate endpoints through cascade links in monostatic BC (MBC) systems. By considering a RIS operating in its near-optimal conditions between a tag and a reader, the proposed PLA leverages the RIS-enhanced power delivery detected by the tag's energy detector and the optimized received signal strength (RSS) at the reader's signal processing unit, addressing the conventional challenges of mutual authentication, low PLA performance, and limited secure coverage area inherent in BC systems. Through theoretical analysis and extensive simulations, we show that as long as RIS is controlled by a trusted party in the network, it can boost the authentication performance across different system settings and strengthen the security features. Additionally, we analyze to explore the potential security threats when the RIS is compromised by an adversary, assessing its impact on the system's PLA performance and secrecy capacity, providing a comprehensive understanding of the security implications for RIS-aided MBC under such circumstances.
DifFaiRec: Generative Fair Recommender with Conditional Diffusion Model
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Although recommenders can ship items to users automatically based on the users' preferences, they often cause unfairness to groups or individuals. For instance, when users can be divided into two groups according to a sensitive social attribute and there is a significant difference in terms of activity between the two groups, the learned recommendation algorithm will result in a recommendation gap between the two groups, which causes group unfairness. In this work, we propose a novel recommendation algorithm named Diffusion-based Fair Recommender (DifFaiRec) to provide fair recommendations. DifFaiRec is built upon the conditional diffusion model and hence has a strong ability to learn the distribution of user preferences from their ratings on items and is able to generate diverse recommendations effectively. To guarantee fairness, we design a counterfactual module to reduce the model sensitivity to protected attributes and provide mathematical explanations. The experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of DifFaiRec over competitive baselines.
TREBLE: Fast Software Updates by Creating an Equilibrium in an Active Software Ecosystem of Globally Distributed Stakeholders
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents our experience with TREBLE, a two-year initiative to build the modular base in Android, a Java-based mobile platform running on the Linux kernel. Our TREBLE architecture splits the hardware independent core framework written in Java from the hardware dependent vendor implementations (e.g., user space device drivers, vendor native libraries, and kernel written in C/C++). Cross-layer communications between them are done via versioned, stable inter-process communication interfaces whose backward compatibility is tested by using two API compliance suites. Based on this architecture, we repackage the key Android software components that suffered from crucial post-launch security bugs as separate images. That not only enables separate ownerships but also independent updates of each image by interested ecosystem entities. We discuss our experience of delivering TREBLE architectural changes to silicon vendors and device makers using a yearly release model. Our experiments and industry rollouts support our hypothesis that giving more freedom to all ecosystem entities and creating an equilibrium are a transformation necessary to further scale the world largest open ecosystem with over two billion active devices.
Ingest-And-Ground: Dispelling Hallucinations from Continually-Pretrained LLMs with RAG
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper presents new methods that have the potential to improve privacy process efficiency with LLM and RAG. To reduce hallucination, we continually pre-train the base LLM model with a privacy-specific knowledge base and then augment it with a semantic RAG layer. Our evaluations demonstrate that this approach enhances the model performance (as much as doubled metrics compared to out-of-box LLM) in handling privacy-related queries, by grounding responses with factual information which reduces inaccuracies.